Limbaugh could sell new Mac

The Hill ^ | 1/26/05 | David Hill

[Vermonter]

Limbaugh could sell new Mac

This week, Apple Computer is launching a campaign to sell a new product, the $499 Mac Mini, that portends to transform the world in a way the original Mac didn’t. But Republicans will be needed for the campaign to succeed.

To put this in context, you need to read Revolution in the Valley, Andy Hertzfeld’s new book about the making of the original Mac in the 1980s. Hertzfeld points out that the initial target price for the first Mac was $500. But by the time it was launched in 1984, the price had ballooned to $2,495.

Many of the Mac’s creators felt betrayed. All initial design goals had centered on Everyman, but instead of a computer that changed the world, the Mac became a niche machine mainly for artisans and limousine liberals who could afford one. The rest of us bought commodity PCs. Fewer than one in 20 computers sold or used today to cruise the Internet is a Mac.

The Mac Mini could rectify this. But will it? Will a low price tag and terrific design alone entice a mass market to buy this new product? I’m not so sure. Apple’s image may still be an impediment to Mac sales.

To research this column, I read lots of discussion boards all across the Internet, and it’s evident that politics still play a role in computer purchases. Just as there are red states and blue states, there are also Mac Democrats and PC Republicans. These battles were especially nasty after Apple went public with its politics and added Al Gore to its board of directors.

Apple’s leader, Steve Jobs, seems to have sensed last year that his company was getting too “political.” He backed off some of his campaigning for John Kerry and cryptically signaled to The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg in an interview that he understands the problem.

“People have said that I shouldn’t get involved politically because probably half our customers are Republicans — maybe a little less ... [but] I do point out that there are more Democrats than Mac users so I’m going to just stay away from all that political stuff because that was just a personal thing,” Jobs said.

There are, in fact, devoted Republican Macintosh users, but that is not the perception. So Apple desperately needs to introduce a replacement image to achieve the original Mac’s vision. There would be no better way to do this than to add a Republican or two to Apple’s board of directors. Mac users such as Karl Rove or Arnold Schwarzenegger adviser Mike Murphy would be possibilities, but Rush Limbaugh is the most obvious choice. Rush is an ardent Mac evangelist and knows a thing or two about marketing. Even if Limbaugh is not put on Apple’s board, the company should market through his daily radio program, paying Rush to tout his favorite computer the same way he builds mattress sales for Select Comfort.

Hertzfeld’s book says the team that created the original Mac had a spirit of “urgency, ambition, passion for excellence, artistic pride, and irreverent humor.” That sounds just like Rush Limbaugh to me. I know that if Rush had been a board member in 1984, he’d have had the guts to back the famous Big Brother Super Bowl ad that Apple’s then-timorous board abandoned.

Apple marketers also need to understand that restoration of their brand’s image in conservative and Republican circles can resonate with various factions of the party. I have already read favorable gun-owner comments about the Mac Mini on the discussion boards of Ted Nugent’s populist United Sportsmen of America website. James Dobson and his Focus on the Family might be intrigued by a computer that is affordable for young families and not subject to porno pop-up ads. And business Republicans will be impressed by the seamless integration of the Mac’s OS X operating system with corporate networks.

The Republican Party is a big tent. Apple should come on in.

[roadcat]

In 1997 Microsoft bought $150 million of non-voting Apple stock, which IIRC was about 5% of outstanding shares. They sold them a few years later for a rather large profit.

When others drool over Apple products, I buy Apple stock. My wife is getting on my case to sell my Apple stock shares, as their price is going through the roof and I had bought low. It's cyclic, every couple years buy low and when they have new products it goes up and then sell. Apple makes me happy in this way!

[pageonetoo]

Just because something costs more doesn't mean it is better....

Then why buy a PC? This is a lot cheaper than a Windoze PC! It plays the same games, too...

When you figure out what else your computer does better, let me know... oh, yeah, nothing else (and that area is changing, as well!)!

[antiRepublicrat]

The overwheming majority of the worlds business dosen't need someone who can dig into UNIX

What's with all those UNIX admin jobs I see on Monster.com?

and the overwheming majority of the real world schools don't teach UNIX programming

Mine did. Acutally, most do, except those sponsored by Microsoft. Yes, I worked for a non-Mac university for several years. All of the hundreds of lab computers were dual-boot Linux/Windows, with a Linux server to re-image the workstations on the fly. I even know lots of old UNIX people who bought a Mac after OS X just because it's UNIX.

like most people with G-classes never take them off the pavement -

Yet those true fanatics who want to get the most out of their purchase will. In that case they get power and comfort, something lacking in the Windows world.

[Dysfunctional]

I didn't "cap" for reasons of being an acronym.

Does SSE or MX technology ring a bell?

The so called advancement only becomes such if the applications are coded to take advantage of the chip design. Most of the stuff becomes sales hype and has no relationship to improving applications on the street. MAC is historic for such lab testing that resulted in little street synergy.

They are not alone:

MX virtually came and went without such coding being put in use.

Even SSE and SSE 2 are more sales gimmicks than reality.

So, what is on the street? It is not some hyped up Steve "Jobsean" boardroom blather.

Show me the tech on the street.

Then show me the pricepoint.

Considering that the MAC processors must be used in the Apple rigs, their actual value for street use is limited.

Best bang for the buck today is the:

Pent 4 2.4c

$162.00

I get 3.3gig from my 2.8c, but others have reached 3.4 and 3.5gig on the 2.4c with only air cooling.

I am not sure where you are coming from in using the term hacks.

[John Lenin]

This is like arguing about who you like better, blonde's or brunette's. It's a fact that MAC hasn't had the fastest or for that matter, the best computers for about 10 years now. You are paying for a name. Like the difference between buying a pair of Levis or buying a pair of Calvin Klein jeans. You MAC users are like liberals when you hear the facts about machine speed. Just accpet the fact that a properly set up PC will blow the doors off your MAC in a speed test.

[ThinkDifferent]

When others drool over Apple products, I buy Apple stock.

Well done. I bought some when they were at 14 (market cap of $4.5 billion, $4.2 billion in cash, not a very hard decision) but sold at 35 since I didn't see it going any higher for a while. Oops. Got back in at 62, but that's a lot of cash I left on the table.

[Dysfunctional]

"And yes it come with OSX which is every bit the equal of XP"

XP is a fast-loading OS that comes with most common drivers for most common hardware right on the OS.

It is virtually all things to all people.

OSX is efficient. But to equate efficient with that of a speedy workhorse is a stretch (but not to a MAC-aholic).

[1L]

>>"I promise you that you'll never ever see a mouse used on an Intal PC platform!". I had the last laugh a few years later.<<

Hmmm. It would have been easier to tell him that mice were used on PCs in 1985 than to wait a "few years."

I'll wait and see on this new Mac. I'm installing a FreeBSD server in my office to network several Windows machines. That is based on being able to buy/build a new $600 or so machine, including monitor, that will work reasonably well. Costs? $600 plus Windows XP (OEM) per workstation and utilizing vintage hardware for server activities.

I'm not sure I could do the same thing with a Mac setup, even using a good G4 box as the server and these new Macs as the workstation.

[N3WBI3]

This is like arguing about who you like better, blonde's or brunette's.

Ok you're making sense here, it a mater of preference.

it's a fact that MAC hasn't had the fastest

1.25G4 is as fast as a P4 2.5, so the gap is not enough to matter.

the best computers for about 10 years now.

Ok so its like arguing about blonds or brunettes (ie a matter of personal choice) yet you can say they are not the best as a statement of fact?

You are paying for a name.

No I paid for a system so stable I would never have to fix anything for my wife...

You MAC users are like liberals when you hear the facts about machine speed. Just accept the fact that a properly set up PC will blow the doors off your MAC in a speed test.

Please I have heard morons on this board compare the clock speed of two different processor architectures, PC's are no faster than Mac's. Now there might be some things one does better than the other and vise versa but to say that one 'smokes' the other is a joke. The right tool for the right job.

BTW if one has to 'properly set up a PC (read know optimization) it kinds looses its appeal to people who value their time. All the people who push macs as costing too much compare the to dell with crap integrated video cards, no firewire, ...

[ThinkDifferent]

This is like arguing about who you like better, blonde's or brunette's. It's a fact that MAC hasn't had the fastest or for that matter, the best computers for about 10 years now.

Your analogy was ok until you negated it in the next sentence. Is it also a fact that brunettes are better than blondes?

You are paying for a name.

No, I'm paying for the OS, and to a lesser extent the industrial design.

Just accpet the fact that a properly set up PC will blow the doors off your MAC in a speed test.

If the Mac (not an acronym, people) is a dual processor G5, I seriously doubt that. But even if you're right, so what? Computers spend most of their billions of cycles waiting on user input. A more efficient user experience can be worth far more than a faster CPU.

[pageonetoo]

Just accpet the fact that a properly set up PC will blow the doors off your MAC in a speed test. - lenin wannabe

Matt Johnson writes "Well it looks like we finally have our first comparison of G5 vs. AMD Opteron, completed by none other than Charlie White, the individual which gained much oh his fame by publishing misleading benchmarks to make Apple's Final Cut Pro Software look like a bad performer. Mr. White's latest comparison shows the Opteron operating roughly 50% faster but what he doesn't say is which compiler was used to generate those SPEC scores. When Apple declared its benchmarks I feared that whoever made the first comparison would likely make this mistake. It seems only appropriate that Charlie White would be first."

An anonymous reader writes "In an ironic twist to the recent benchmark wars, Intel referred the Mac site MacFixIt to an analyst at Gartner Group who actually backed the PowerPC G5 platform with this assertion: 'These models certainly equal Intel's advanced 875 platform and should allow Apple to go until 2005 without a major platform refresh.'"

Another anonymous user writes, "While browsing the Xbench benchmark comparison site, I discovered some G5 benchmarks! The 'G5 Lab Machine at WWDC' got an overall score of 164.78, but much higher scores in certain areas. All of the tests are calibrated to give 100 on an 800MHz DP Quicksilver G4."

vitaboy writes "Sound Technology, one of the "leading UK distributors specialising in musical instruments, music software and pro-audio equipment," seems to have some data regarding the real-world performance of the G5 compared to the high-end PC. They state, 'The dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 with Logic Platinum 6.1 can play 115 tracks, compared with a maximum of 35 tracks on the Dell Dimension 8300 and 81 tracks on the Dell Precision 650 each with Cubase SX 1.051 ... More impressively, the 1.6GHz single-processor Power Mac G5 played 50 percent more tracks than the 3GHz Pentium 4-based system.'"

..and it can go on, and on, and on, and on... but reality doesn't mean anything to you, I guess! Smoke some more of that stuff!

[Dysfunctional]

Another anonymous user writes...

Another African-American voter reported waiting in line over 11 hours...

[John Lenin]

Like I said where speed counts MACS are absent. Gamers will spend $600 on a video card to have a half step on you. Believe what you want and drop that bottle of Merlot while you are at it .
LOL

[antiRepublicrat]

That's old Mac vs. new Mac, but there's a lot of momentum in the gaming world towards the PC due to the Mac's previous horrible performance.

Things like 3D rendering are MUCH faster in Macs these days due to the new IBM PPC970 chip in them, the son of the POWER4 server chip and a cousin to the chips used in IBM's blade servers and supercomputers. This is why Renderman and Maya are out for OS X now, why XServes are getting popular for supercomputing (the #7 Mac system is cheaper than any other on the Top 10, possibly Top 20), and why they used 600 G5 Macs to do the cleanup work for the new Star Wars DVD release. They are far more worth their price than they were three years ago.

If you do image or video rendering, you might be interested in this bit. The next version of OS X, Tiger, will allow applications to easily offload much of the image processing work to the graphics card. Can you imagine the increase in speed when your GeForce 6800 Ultra is doing your image processing with it's 256-bit, 35.2 GB/sec graphics core? And that ability won't cost you anything extra above Macs with the current OS, unless you're upgrading.

[Dustbunny]

extra monitor and USB keyboard sitting around

Yes. I also have a cordless mouse and keyboard that eats batteries.

[John Lenin]

What ever works for you, it's the arrogance of MAC users that ticks me off. High prices don't necessarily mean better. It's what you are used to. I mean for $150 less you can get an MP3 player with more storage and the sound will depend on your speakers. If you want to support that Marxist, Al Gore loving Steve Jobs, be my guest.

[antiRepublicrat]

Like I said where speed counts MACS are absent. Gamers will spend $600 on a video card

Apple charges $450 to upgrade from an ATI Radion 9600XT/128MB to a GeForce 6800 Ultra/256MB DDL (dual DVI output to run the monster 30" flat panel). Is that enough?

[John Lenin]

And it still won't come close to an overclocked P4. I'm done with this arguement.

[N3WBI3]

MACS... Its Mac, not MAC is that too hard to understand?

Gamers will spend $600 on a video card to have a half step on you.

Gamers who spend 600$ on a video card are *not* the bulk of the PC market, thats why dell does so well.

[antiRepublicrat]

High prices don't necessarily mean better.

Of course. I thought Macs were a horrible bargain just a few years ago, and even worse before OS X. Macs have just recently hit the sweet spot with OS X 10.3 and the PPC970.

If you want to support that Marxist, Al Gore loving Steve Jobs, be my guest.

Or you could support the UN-loving, Planned Parenthood-supporting Bill Gates. Your choice.